Troubleshoot VirtualBox Linux Ubuntu guest access from Windows host

Question

I'm running VirtualBox on a Windows 7 Host, with an Ubuntu Linux guest OS.

I'm trying to set up Samba on Linux to access a folder (/home/user) from the Windows host as a share - which I believe SHOULD be possible, but having trouble getting it to work. I am aware of the Share Folder option of VirtualBox but I specifically need to get this done using Samba.

I installed Samba (apt-get install samba sambafs) and set up /etc/smbd.conf with a share

[usershare]
path = /home/user
read only = no
browseable = yes

Not worried about securing it by user just yet - want to get it working first.

I set up two network adapters in VirtualBox - one NAT so I can get to the Internet for apt-get and stuff, one Host-Only hoping that will let me access the Ubuntu guest from the host only. (Hence the lack of immediate concern over user-level security.)

Now, I can see an IP for the Host-only network in Windows, and tried to access it in the Windows Explorer - a blank window comes up and I don't see anything. The IP looks like 169.254.127.xxx. If I put in \\169.254.127.xxx\usershare it hangs for a while and fails.

How do I troubleshoot this?

Is this likely a networking config problem or a Samba problem?

Answer 1

OK, I think I figured it out.

There were a few gaps in my understanding:

Samba setup

• I realized that Samba users require their own authentication are not necessarily the same as UNIX usernames/passwords. So I created account with smbpasswd.
• I then confirmed that Samba setup was correct by mounting locally within the VM using smbmount, e.g., smbmount //localhost/share /mnt/test -o user=testuser,pass=password

Virtualbox setup

• I ended up wtih two NIC's on my VM - eth0 is default NAT adapter, then new eth1 is host-only
• In the VM, I gave eth1 a static IP address on the same subnet as the host-only network in VirtualBox File>Preferences>Network menu. The key I was missing is that the VM needs a DIFFERENT IP address than the host-only adapter on the host side. So the host-only adapter in VirtualBox is on 192.168.100.1, the static IP for Ubuntu guest is 192.168.100.2 (for example).
• Finally, once this was set up, I could see the Samba share under \\192.168.100.2\share\